Customer Service and Operations are the two departments that are the life blood of your district. As a service based business, everything revolves around completing the service safely, on time and in a way that makes the customer feel satisfied. If a driver doesn’t show up for work, you have a crisis that needs to have immediate attention. If you have a CSR at lunch, one off sick and only one person to answer customer calls, you have a crisis. Behind every 5 minute hold time is a situation that could have been prevented if there was a crisis management plan in place. Do you have a plan in place to handle absenteeism, fluctuating work load and other employee disasters?

Managing Customer Service Staffing
Step one in creating a crisis management plan is to make a list of events that you can prepare for ahead of time. Some of the most common known events that affect a customer service department include:
1) Billing and collection notices
2) A new municipal contract
3) Holidays
4) Vacations
5) Meetings or training
6) Lunch breaks
7) Hours of operation

Step two would be to assess your call volume or the number of calls you receive each day of the month. You want to be aware of the days and times when you can expect a heavier call volume so you can plan ahead. Keep a count of the number of voice mail messages that are left on the after-hours voice mail. If those messages are time stamped, that will provide additional information to help you properly staff your department. In the event that you have a considerable amount of voice mail messages to return each morning, consider staggering your employees’ start and end times so that you can provide better service to your customers. If you determine that your high volume days are Monday and Tuesday between 8 and 10:30 and again between 3 and 5, that data tells you to have all hands on deck answering the phones during those times.

Step three is to assess the other work a CSR must complete in his or her day. List the tasks and their deadlines. Is it a daily task such as closing out a route or monthly task such as billing? Then, you need to detail the amount of time that is required for each task. The goal is to determine how much actual time each CSR has to take customer calls. Example: If the CSR works 9-5, has 1 hour for lunch and has 3 hours of daily tasks to complete, the total available time to answer customer phone calls is 4 hours. Take into consideration the average length of your customer calls. You can use an average of 5 minutes for a quick calculation. 4 hours divided by 5 minutes would suggest the CSR is able to handle about 48 calls in a day. If you expect to have 200 calls a day and only have 2 CSRs, your customers will experience long hold times and stressed CSRs. Unhappy customers and unhappy employees are preventable. Start by having each employee document their duties and how much time it takes to complete each. Having each individual document the start and end time for each completed task will give you great data. You will also be able to identify those who are not working efficiently.

Step four is to plan for the upcoming quarter. If you have control on when past due notices are sent, be strategic in when they go out so they don’t hit the streets on your heaviest call days or when you are trying to close the month. It can be a disaster to have billing and collections notices go out at the same time. Invest in a dry erase board calendar. The office staff should be able to see your forecast for the quarter. Color-code the calendar so that red, for example, is an all hands on deck symbol.
Step five is to try to reduce the number of calls that come into customer service that do not belong in customer service and overwhelm phone lines. Examples of these types of calls would be calls for employees and holiday schedules. When you have an automated message that answers the phone, routinely adding an infomercial on upcoming details that are important to a customer such as holiday schedules, will help eliminate calls to customer service. When sales and management have their business cards printed, providing a direct dial number and not the main customer service number would also help alleviate calls to customer service.

Think back to when you were a kid and you would participate in a fire drill at school. The purpose of the drill was so that everyone would know what to do if that crisis became a reality. Maybe it’s time you conduct a fire drill of your own so your employees know exactly what to do when a disaster is looming.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Benjamin Franklin